SAT revisions prompt debate among students, educators

High school freshmen struggling to memorize words such as “legerdemain” and “inchoate” for college admissions tests can breathe a sigh of relief — “SAT words” will soon be a thing of the past.

The upcoming elimination of difficult vocabulary words is part of a sweeping revision to the SAT, the pencil-and-paper exam that has long served as a standardized measurement for college admissions nationwide.

The College Board, a non-profit association that develops the test, announced the revision Wednesday at an event in Austin.

The College Board is making other substantial revisions to the exam, including making the essay portion optional and eliminating the writing section of the test.

The grading scale will revert to the original 1,600-point standard, and the exam will no longer penalize students for guessing the wrong answer. The new exam will be administered for the first time in 2016.

The changes mark the first substantial revision to the exam since 2005, when the College Board added the essay requirement and changed the top score to 2,400.

Leaders at The College Board say the revision was prompted by a need to better align the exam with the skills and knowledge students need to succeed in college.

Rather than testing students to see if they can regurgitate a litany of obscure words, the test will focus on terms students are likely to encounter in college, such as “synthesis.”

The new test will feature problems that require students to identify what evidence led them to their conclusions, a line of questioning designed to encourage deeper thinking.

“The changes to the exam were really focused to redesign the SAT to help center the assessment of the exam on a few things that evidence shows matters most for college and career readiness,” says Steve Colón, the vice president of access to opportunity at The College Board.

The essay section will be based on analysis of a source document and require students to critique how the author of the document builds an argument.

In the reading section, students will analyze documents selected from the history of the founding of the United States.

The revisions have been polarizing since their announcement last week. Bibliophiles have eulogized the SAT’s arcane verbiage in essays peppered with $10 words, and several critics of the test have claimed that the changes don’t go far enough to make the test an accurate barometer of college readiness.

“We think it’s largely reorganizing deck chairs on the testing Titanic,” says Bob Schaeffer, the public education director at the National Center for Fair and Open Testing.

Schaeffer says the SAT and similar exams favor students who have more time and money to spend on pricey preparatory courses. The new exam, he says, does nothing to eliminate that bias.

“It creates unfair barriers to access and ends up excluding many students who could otherwise do the job,” he says.

In its announcement of the new SAT, The College Board unveiled a free online preparatory course offered in partnership with Khan Academy, a non-profit provider of online educational materials.

The College Board offers free online preparatory materials for the exam, including sample questions, but the new online curriculum will be more extensive, Colón says.

The industry built around coaching students for the all-important test isn’t going away, however, says Shaan Patel, the director of SAT programs for Veritas Prep, a company that offers SAT preparation courses and admissions consulting.

If anything, the elimination of difficult vocabulary words and the addition of several predictable source documents makes the test more coachable, he says.

“What’s interesting to me is the SAT overall seems like it will be easier,” Patel says.

The changes to the exam might have been prompted by increased competition from the ACT, which surpassed the SAT as the most-taken college admissions exam in 2012, Patel says.

Some of the changes made to the SAT, such as making the essay portion optional and not penalizing students for guessing were already made to the ACT.

If the ACT responds to The College Board’s recent revision by making its test easier, the revisions could begin a cycle of “dumbing down” admissions exams to gain popularity with students, Patel says.

“It’s sort of going to turn to a race to the bottom eventually,” he says.

It’s still unknown how the changes will affect student performance, Lian Lynch, the director of graduate student administration at North Carolina State University, wrote in an e-mail.

Removing the penalty for guessing will probably increase scores slightly for low-scoring students and leave scores on the opposite end of the bell curve relatively untouched, Lynch wrote.

Eliminating the established vocabulary from the SAT might confuse students who have already begun preparing, says Camille Mavis, a junior at Inspire School of Arts and Sciences in Chico, Calif., who woke up early to take the test Saturday.

“I think the change in vocabulary might make it difficult to study because you don’t know what to expect,” she says.

Her friend Sophie Rogers-Davidson, also a junior at Inspire School of Arts and Sciences, spent the past week studying flash cards to get into her target school, University of California-Davis.

Rogers-Davidson lamented that the essay, one of the best assessments of a student’s ability to think, will no longer be mandatory.

“I think the essay being optional is kind of lame, honestly, because it shows what you know and what you need to know,” she says.